Here I Am (47 page)

“O Muslims, God demands of his servants the deaths of these Jews. I call on the soldiers of the Qur'an to wage our final battle against those beasts who kill the prophets. O Muslims, must I tell you the story of the Jewish woman who gave the Prophet, peace be upon Him, poisoned lamb, to kill Him? The Prophet, peace be upon Him, said to his companions, ‘Do not eat this lamb. It is telling me it has poison in it.' But it was too late for the companion Bishr ibn al-Bara, who died from the poison. The Jewess tried to kill our Prophet, peace be upon Him, but praise God, she failed. This is the nature of the Jews, these twice-cursed people! They will try to kill you, but Allah will plant knowledge of their wicked deeds in your hearts, and save you. You must do as the Prophet, peace be upon Him, did with the Jew Kenana ibn al-Rabi, who hid the treasure of the Jews, the Banu Nadir. The Prophet, peace be upon Him, told Az-Zubair ibn Al-Awwam, ‘Torture this Jew until you learn from him what he knows.' He held hot steel to his chest and he nearly died. And then the Prophet, peace be upon Him, delivered the Jew Kenana to Muhammad ibn Maslamah, and he cut off his head! Then he took the Jews of Kenana as slaves. Muhammad, peace be upon Him, took the most beautiful woman of the Jews for himself! This is the way, O Muslims! Let the Prophet be your teacher in your dealings with the Jews!

“O brother Palestinians! Remember! When the Muslims, the Arabs, the Palestinians, make war against the Jews, they do so to worship Allah. They enter the war as Muslims! The hadith does not say, ‘O Sunni, O Shiite, O Palestinian, O Syrian, O Persian, come fight.' It says, ‘O Muslim'!
For too long we have battled ourselves and lost. Now we will battle together and be victorious.

“We are fighting in the name of Islam, because Islam commands us to wage war unto death against anyone who plunders our land. Surrender is the way of Satan!”

But then, after his final word, the camera stayed on the prime minister. His gaze held. And the camera held. At first it seemed like an awkward broadcasting mistake, but it was no accident.

His gaze held.

And the camera held.

And then the prime minister did something so outrageously symbolic, so potentially kitschy, so many miles over the top, it risked breaking the legs of its intended recipients just as they approached the necessary leap of faith.

He removed a shofar from beneath the lectern. And without any explanation of its meaning—its biblical or historical significance, its intent to awaken sleeping Jews to repent and return, without even sharing that this particular shofar, this twice-curled ram's horn, was two thousand years old, that it was the shofar discovered at Masada, stashed in a water hole and preserved by the dry desert heat, that its inside contained biological remnants of a noble Jewish martyr—he brought it to his lips.

The camera held.

The prime minister inhaled, and gathered into the ram's horn the molecules of every Jew who had ever lived: the breath of warrior kings and fishmongers; tailors, matchmakers, and executive producers; kosher butchers, radical publishers, kibbutzniks, management consultants, orthopedic surgeons, tanners, and judges; the grateful laugh of someone with more than forty grandchildren gathered in his hospital room; the false moan of a prostitute who hid children under the bed on which she kissed
Nazis on the mouth; the sigh of an ancient philosopher at a moment of understanding; the cry of a new orphan alone in a forest; the final air bubble to rise from the Seine and burst as Paul Celan sank, his pockets full of stones; the word
clear
from the lips of the first Jewish astronaut, strapped into a chair facing infinity. And the breath of those who never lived, but whose existence Jewish existence depended on: the patriarchs, matriarchs, and prophets; Abel's last plea; Sarah's laughter at the prospect of the miracle; Abraham offering his God and his son what could not be offered to both: “Here I am.”

The prime minister aimed the shofar forty-five degrees, sixty degrees, and in New York, and in Los Angeles, and in Miami, Chicago, and Paris, in London, Buenos Aires, Moscow, and Melbourne, television screens trembled, they shook.

“The hardest thing to say is the hardest thing to hear: forced to choose between my parents, I would be able to.

“And I've talked about it with Max and Benjy, and if forced to choose, each of them could choose as well. Two of us would have chosen one, and one of us the other, but we agreed that if forced to choose, we would all choose the same one, so that we could stay together.

“When I did Model UN a couple of weeks ago, the country we were representing, Micronesia, suddenly came into possession of a nuclear weapon. We didn't ask for a nuclear weapon, and didn't want a nuclear weapon, and nuclear weapons are, in pretty much every way, horrible. But there's a reason people have them, and it's to never have to use them.

“That's it. I'm finished.”

He didn't bow, they didn't clap. No one moved or spoke.

As always, Sam didn't know what to do with his body. But the organism that was the roomful of family and friends seemed to depend on his movement. If he started to cry, someone would comfort him. If he ran out, someone would follow. If he'd just go talk to Max, everyone would schmooze. But if he continued to stand there, fists balled, they would continue to stand there.

Jacob thought maybe he could clap his hands, smile, and say something lame, like “Dig in!”

Julia thought maybe she could go to Sam, put her arm around him, and touch her head to his head.

Even Benjy, who, by virtue of never giving it any thought, always knew what to do, was motionless.

Irv longed to assume the authority of the family's new patriarch, but he didn't know how. Was there a five-dollar bill in his pocket?

From the middle of the room, Billie said, “Yet.”

Everyone turned to her.

“What?” Sam asked.

There was no sound to overcome, but she screamed: “Yet!”

The cheering would continue long after the Ayatollah lowered his final raised arm of solidarity. Long after he made his way behind the temporary stage, surrounded by a dozen plainclothes bodyguards. The cheering—the applauding, the chanting, the hollering, the singing—would continue after he was greeted by a line of his closest advisers, each kissing him, blessing him. After he was put into a car with two-inch-thick windows and no door handles and driven away. The cheering continued, and intensified, but without a gravitational center, the crowd moved outward in every direction.

Wolf Blitzer and his panel started discussing the speech—without the time to digest the translation, they just pulled quote after quote until they'd reassembled it out of order—but the camera stayed on the crowd. The mass of people couldn't be contained by Azadi Square, which pumped them through the connecting streets like blood, and it couldn't be contained by the camera's frame.

Jacob imagined every street in Tehran packed with people throwing fists in the air, beating their chests. He imagined every park and gathering space overflowing like Azadi Square. The camera closed on a woman slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other, over and over; a boy screaming from his father's shoulders, four arms in the air. There were people on balconies, on rooftops, on the branches of trees. People atop cars and corrugated metal awnings too hot to be touched with bare skin.

The Ayatollah's words had dripped into more than a billion open ears,
and there had been two hundred thousand pairs of fixed eyes in the square, and 0.2 percent of the world was Jewish, but watching the replays of the speech—the Ayatollah's gesticulating fists, the crowd's undulations—Jacob thought only of his family.

Before they were allowed to take Sam home from the hospital when he was born, Jacob had to sit through a fifteen-minute course covering the Ten Commandments of Caring for a Newborn—the absolute rudiments of new parenting:
YOU SHALL NOT SHAKE YOUR BABY; YOU SHALL CARE FOR THE UMBILICAL STUMP WITH A COTTON SWAB SOAKED IN WARM WATER AND SOAP, AT LEAST ONCE A DAY; YOU SHALL BE AWARE OF THE FONTANEL; YOU SHALL FEED YOUR BABY ONLY BREAST MILK OR FORMULA, BETWEEN ONE AND THREE OUNCES, EVERY TWO TO THREE HOURS, AND YOU SHALL NOT BE OBLIGATED TO BURP YOUR BABY IF HE FALLS ASLEEP AFTER A FEEDING;
and so on. All things that anyone who had gone to a parenting class, or had ever spent time in the presence of a baby, or had simply been born Jewish, would already know. But the Tenth Commandment rattled Jacob.
YOU SHALL REMEMBER: IT WILL NOT LAST
.

After the guests went home, after Uber came for the Torah, after Tamir took all the kids to the Nats game (where, thanks to Max's thoughtful ingenuity, Sam's bar mitzvah was announced on the scoreboard during the seventh-inning stretch), after a bit of unnecessary e-mailing, after a walk to the corner with Argus, Jacob and Julia were left to clean up. Before they had kids, if asked to conjure images of parenthood they would have said things like “Reading in bed,” and “Giving a bath,” and “Running while holding the seat of a bicycle.” Parenthood contains such moments of warmth and intimacy, but isn't them. It's cleaning up. The great bulk of family life involves no exchange of love, and no meaning, only fulfillment. Not the fulfillment of feeling fulfilled, but of fulfilling that which now falls to you.

Julia couldn't bring herself to accept paper plates in the end, so there were a few loads of dishes to do. Jacob filled the machine to the brim and then hand-washed the rest, he and Julia taking turns with the soaping-up and the drying-off.

“You were right not to believe him,” Jacob said.

“Apparently. But you were right that we should have believed him.”

“Did we mishandle it?”

“I don't know,” Julia said. “Is that even the question? Everything with kids is some kind of mishandling. So we try to learn, and mishandle it less badly in the future. But in the meantime, they've changed, so the lesson doesn't apply.”

“It's a lose-lose.”

They both laughed.

“A love-love.”

The sponge was already well on its way to mush, the only clean dish towel was damp, and the dish soap had to be diluted with water for there to be enough, but they made it work.

“Listen,” Jacob said. “Not fatalistically, but responsibly, I arranged a whole bunch of things with the accountant and lawyer, and—”

“Thank you,” Julia said.

“Anyway, it's all pretty clearly spelled out in a document that I put on your bedside table—in a sealed envelope, in case one of the kids came upon it.”

“You're not going to die.”

“Of course not.”

“You're not even going to go.”

“I am.”

She turned on the disposal, and Jacob had the thought that if he were a Foley artist tasked with creating the sound of Satan screaming out from hell, he might just hold a mic to what he was now hearing.

“Another thing,” he said.

“What?”

“I'll wait till it's done.”

She switched it off.

“Remember I mentioned that I've been working on a show for a long time?”

“Your secret masterpiece.”

“I never described it like that.”

“About us.”

“Very loosely.”

“Yes, I know what you're referring to.”

“There's a copy of it in the bottom-right drawer of my desk.”

“The whole thing?”

“Yes. And on top is the bible.”

“The Bible?”

“For the show. It's a kind of guide for how to read it. For future actors, a future director.”

“Shouldn't the work speak for itself?”

“Nothing speaks for itself.”

“Sam sure does.”

“If the show were Sam, it wouldn't need a bible.”

“And if you were Sam, you wouldn't need a show.”

“Correct.”

“OK. So your show and its bible are in the bottom-right drawer of your desk. And in the event that you actually go to Israel and, what, perish in battle? I'm supposed to send it to your agent?”

“No. Please, Julia.”

“Burn it?”

“I'm not
Kafka
.”

“What?”

“I was hoping you'd read it.”

“If you die.”

“And only if.”

“I don't know if I'm touched by how open you're being, or hurt by how closed off you are.”

“You heard Sam: ‘To be and not to be.' ”

Julia wiped the suds from the counter and hung the dish towel over the faucet. “Now what?”

“Well,” Jacob said, taking his phone from his pocket to check the time. “It's three o'clock, which is too early to go to sleep.”

“Are you tired?”

“No,” he said. “I'm just used to being tired.”

“I don't know what that means, but OK.”

“Aqua seafoam shame.”

“Huh?”

“Don't assume it has to mean anything.” Jacob put his palm on the counter and said, “It's you, of course. What Sam said.”

“What he said about what?”

“You know. About whom he'd pick.”

“Yes,” she said with a kind smile, “of course it's me. The real question is, who was the dissenter?”

“That might very well have been a little weapon of psychological warfare.”

“You're probably right.”

They laughed again.

“Why haven't you asked me not to go to Israel?”

“Because after sixteen years, it goes without saying.”

“Look! A crying Hebrew baby.”

“Look! A pharaoh's deaf daughter.”

Jacob slid his hands into his pockets and said, “I know sign language.”

Julia laughed. “What?”

“I'm completely serious.”

“No, you aren't.”

“I've known it for as long as you've known me.”

“You're full of shit.”

“I'm not.”

“Sign,
I'm full of shit.”

Jacob pointed to himself, then moved his open right hand over the top of his left fist, then he held out his right hand with the thumb sticking up, grabbed the thumb in the fist of his left hand, and pulled his left hand up and off the thumb.

“How am I supposed to know if that's real?”

“It is.”

“Sign,
Life is long.”

Jacob made his hands into the shape that kids use for guns, aimed his forefingers at his belly, then traced them up his torso toward his neck. Then he extended his left arm, pointed at the fist with his right forefinger, and moved the finger along his arm up to his shoulder.

“Wait, are you crying?” Jacob asked.

“No.”

“Are you about to?”

“No,” she said. “Are you?”

“I'm always about to.”

“Sign,
Look! A crying Hebrew baby.”

Jacob held his right hand by his face, about eye level, raised his index and middle fingers, and pushed his arm forward—two eyes moving forward in space. Then he ran the forefinger of each hand down his cheeks, one at a time and alternating, as if painting tears onto himself. Then, with his right hand, he stroked an imaginary beard. Then he created a cradle of his arms, palms up and overlapped at belly level, and rocked it back and forth.

“That beard-stroking? That's the sign for
Hebrew
?”

“For
Hebrew
, for
Jew
. Yes.”

“That manages to be at once anti-Semitic and misogynistic.”

“I'm sure you know that most Nazis were deaf.”

“Yes, I did know that.”

“And French people, and English, and Spaniards, and Italians, and Scandinavians. Pretty much everyone who isn't us.”

“Which is why your father is always shouting.”

“That's right,” Jacob laughed. “And by the way, the sign for
stingy
is the same as the sign for Jew, just with a clenched fist at the end.”

“Jesus.”

Jacob held his straightened arms out to his sides and tilted his head toward his right shoulder. Julia laughed and squeezed the sponge until her knuckles went white.

“I really don't know what to say, Jacob. I can't believe that you've kept an entire language secret.”

“I wasn't keeping it secret. I just didn't tell anyone.”

“Why?”

“When I write my memoir, I'm going to call it ‘The Big Book of Whys.' ”

“People hearing that title might think it's
w-i-s-e.”

“Let them think.”

“And I thought you were calling it ‘The Bible.' ”

Julia turned off the radio, which had been broadcasting at no volume for who knows how long. “Different countries have different sign languages, right?”

“Yes.”

“So what's the Jewish sign for
Jew
?”

“I have no idea,” Jacob said. He picked up his phone and googled “Hebrew Sign Language for Jew.” He turned his phone toward Julia and said, “It's the same.”

“That's sad.”

“It is, isn't it?”

“On a few levels.”

“What would you make it?” Jacob asked.

“A Star of David would require some serious double-jointedness.”

“Maybe a palm on the top of the head?”

“Not bad,” Julia said, “but it doesn't account for women. Or the great majority of Jewish men, like you, who don't wear yarmulkes. Maybe palms open like a book?”

“Very nice,” Jacob said, “but are illiterate Jews not Jews? Are babies?”

“I wasn't thinking that it was reading a book, but the book itself. The Torah, maybe. Or the Book of Life. How do you sign
life
?”

“Remember from
Life is long
?” he said, once again making his hands into guns, and then moving the forefingers up his torso.

“So like this,” Julia said, putting her hands in front of her, unpeeling them like a book, and then moving those upturned palms up her torso, as if pushing a book through her lungs.

“I'll run it up the flagpole next time the Elders of Zion convene.”

“What's the sign for
gentile
?”

“Gentile?
Who fucking cares?”

Julia laughed, and Jacob laughed.

“I can't believe you knew a language all alone.”

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda single-handedly revived Hebrew. Unlike most Zionists, he wasn't passionate about the creation of the State of Israel so that his people would have a home. He wanted his language to have a home. He knew that without a state—without a place for Jews to haggle, and curse, and create secular laws, and make love—the language wouldn't survive. And without a language, there wouldn't ultimately be a people.

Ben-Yehuda's son, Itamar, was the first native speaker of Hebrew in more than a thousand years. He was raised forbidden to hear or speak any other language. (His father once berated Itamar's mother for singing a Russian lullaby.) His parents wouldn't allow him to play with other children—none of them spoke Hebrew—but as a concession to his loneliness they gave him a dog with the name Maher, meaning “fast” in Hebrew. It was a kind of child abuse. And yet it is possible that he is even more responsible than his father for the first time a modern Jew ever told a dirty joke in Hebrew, ever told another Jew to fuck off in Hebrew, ever typed Hebrew into a court stenography machine, ever shouted unmeant words in Hebrew, ever, in Hebrew, moaned in pleasure.

Jacob put the last dried mugs back on the shelf upside down.

“What are you doing?” Julia asked.

“I'm doing it your way.”

“And you're not hysterically concerned about their ability to dry without proper circulation?”

“No, but neither am I suddenly convinced they're going to fill with dust. I'm just tired of disagreeing.”

God instructed Moses to put both the intact tablets and the broken
tablets in the ark. The Jews carried them—the broken and the whole—for their forty years of wandering, and placed them both in the Temple in Jerusalem.

Why? Why didn't they just bury them, as would befit a sacred text? Or leave them behind, as would befit a blasphemy?

Because they were ours.